The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
The ability to recognize and track objects that could be moved by human or other robotic devices with six degrees of freedom is essential if robots are to become useful in a more flexible manufacturing environment. Known industrial robotic devices have vision systems that locate objects using a set of static images or track objects in 2D instead of 3D. In addition, these vision systems usually rely on fixed processing steps that don't change based on the environment. These kinds of vision system designs are not suitable for distributing resources for heavy computation tasks such as real time tracking in 3D and cannot be easily extended when a new vision algorithm is available.
Known robotic vision systems include vision systems that recognize an object pose within a static image and are suitable for industrial robots in a static environment. Known active vision systems exploring a scene have been proposed, and focus on recognizing and reasoning a single static scene. Vision systems for tracking an object pose have been proposed and include two algorithms that execute in different threads to achieve real time tracking. However, such systems have been shown to be unable to recognize objects other than the object presently being tracked.
Known vision systems are mostly single threaded systems that execute a sequence of algorithms. Such vision systems may use multiple threads to speed up the process, but fail to execute multiple algorithms in parallel. For a system that has more than one possible algorithm executing, distributing computing resources based on priority and selecting which algorithm to execute is crucial. Known vision systems simply act as a sensor and have one-way communication with the robot, thus seeking vision accuracy without feedback from the robot.